Diane Webber Bio
Diane Webber was an American glamour model, belly dancer, and actress. Born Marguerite Diane Empey on July 29, 1932, in Los Angeles, California, she has also been credited as Marguerite Empey. Playboy named her its May 1955 Playmate at 22. Her appearance dates from the magazine's formative 1950s, when the Playmate format was still taking shape.
Webber had natural breasts, green eyes and brown hair. Her measurements are 39-23-37.
Diane Webber had already built a substantial glamour career before Playboy became one of its most visible chapters. She worked as a chorus girl at San Francisco’s Bimbo’s 365 Club and modeled for photographers including Peter Gowland, Bunny Yeager and Keith Bernard, appearing across men’s magazines, advertising and pin-up photography. The following year, Playboy invited her back for a second Playmate appearance—an unusual repeat in the magazine’s early history—with the 1956 session photographed by Russ Meyer.
Her image travelled well beyond magazine pages. Webber appeared on numerous record covers from the 1950s into the 1970s, including albums by George Shearing, Nelson Riddle, Les Baxter and Xavier Cugat. Film and television supplied another outlet: she played mermaids in both Mermaids of Tiburon and a 1967 episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and later appeared in The Trial of Billy Jack. The screen work was intermittent, but it extended a visual career already unusually broad in scope.
Webber’s relationship with nudity also developed into something more philosophical than commercial modeling. During the 1960s she became involved in naturism and appeared in publications advocating the lifestyle. In 1965, she was called to testify in Iowa during a case involving allegedly obscene nudist material; instead of helping condemn it, Webber used the witness stand to defend naturist principles. That willingness to separate nudity from shame became one of the more distinctive threads running through her later public life.
Dance eventually became an equally important vocation. From 1969 through 1980, Webber taught Middle Eastern dance at Everywoman’s Village in Van Nuys and founded Perfumes of Araby, one of the early American companies devoted to the form. Her performances were designed for broad audiences rather than nightclub titillation, sometimes involving dozens of dancers and attracting women and children as readily as men. The work drew on ballet training she had received as a child while moving her far beyond the static world of pin-up photography.
In her later years, Webber worked as a librarian and archivist for a Santa Monica law firm. She died in 2008 following complications from cancer surgery. Her public career had travelled an extraordinary distance by then: chorus line, glamour model, twice-featured Playmate, album-cover regular, actress, naturist advocate, dance teacher and archivist. The photographs made her recognizable, but the life around them turned out to be considerably more expansive.
